It’s certainly was a great year of change in 2020. Following 4 years of Brexit discussions many businesses across the UK were thinking about stability to take us through that time, then came Covid-19. With the economy under great strain following the first lockdown, and with a second wave rising the recovery ahead is still uncertain, especially as we now commence our third lockdown.
I would like to share with you a great Microsoft paper, “Creating a blueprint for UK competitiveness”. I hope you find it useful as you make plans for the future as we drive through the changing landscape, world-wide.
Microsoft has carried out crucial research and found that “54% of UK leaders… have seen a net decrease in revenue [during 2020]” and that one in 5 of those businesses have found the drop was greater than 15%.
A great quote in the paper is from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft who says, “the initial global response to COVID-19 saw two years of digital transformation in two months.”
This is key. Businesses moving to working from home looked to online working methods such as Teams, Zoom, and Skype to name a few, and these solutions became critical to daily business life not just for internal use but for external use as well; reaching out to clients and seeing faces being critical. Using things like Office 365 and Dynamics 365 for sales and service are important to ensure that everyone can collaborate and work together. Working remotely long-term has had a massive impact on businesses not just technologically but also for us as humans. One business I was speaking to recently has said that they need to generate 33% more business because the pace has lessened with homeworker clients.
The Microsoft paper, “Creating a blueprint for UK competitiveness” discusses what this new model of competitiveness looks like and how things are differing going forward to what happened before including people, budgets, and technology. It discusses the need for “responsive leadership” and “investment in new digital solutions.” I hope you find it useful as we find our way forward in this “new normal”.
